Capitalpete

Email done, just have to wait for a reply now, thanks for your help! CP

Well. that was easy. I found someone to take on the cache, now how do I go about listing the new cacher as the cache owner? I will email the cache approver to see how they want to handle it I guess. CP

I have a question. I have a cache series called "A penny for your thoughts" and I do not have a great deal of time to devote to maintaining the series. The cache series have been quite popular, and I would like to see it continue. It really has not been that much work, only the occaisional missing cache container. But, I do not have a lot of time right now to maintain them. Is there a way for someone to (Victoria) to adopt the series? How can I post it for adoption? Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this. CP

Have to agree here with JeepCachr! Love the 201, and for some reason it really seems to hold a lock. Not sure if this is due to the fact that it is on the wrist and not elsewhere, but it seems to find and hold a lock really well, in the car, on a bus, or just walking downtown. For the money it sure is hard to beat. I thought that it would work good for Kayaking, but I find that I use it a lot just for walking, or even using it as a watch, yes I know, pretty sad excuse to wear it but it does work as a watch too. I was really interested in using onboard sailboats as a timer (great feature that countdown timer is terriffic for setting up for race starts) and for sail trim when on a friends boat. I think I will stick to the foretrex, and spend the $500 difference on airfare to Hawaii or something. CP

Its out there Sully. lol As for the Metroguide, it appears that you can load it on more than two units, as far as if it is ethical, that part is up to you. As for the univeral code, well that I cannot tell you. Is there one GM or Ford Key that fits ALL of their brand of cars? What if I have one, will I come and take your car? Is there a need for such a thing? These things I cannot tell you. CP

OUCH! My feet hurt from just reading this thread. Seriously, there is a lot of information here, and although I SHOULD know better, sometimes I put off getting new hiking shoes sometimes. After reading this thread, I think I am going to go out tommorow and get a good new pair, as now summer is coming and all I have are really good hiking boots. This being said, what do you people recommend for a DECENT pair of sandals that are worth buying and putting my feet on?? I have not ever had any problems with my feet, and after reading this, I sure want to do everything I can to avoid problems. CP

Geez, were you smoking a cigarette too???? That sounds awful dangerous! Here in Canada they freak out if you answer your cell phone while pumping gas, nevermind changing batteries in your GPS. Sounds like Magellan treated you well, good to hear. I will stick with my Garmins, they treat me well also. I think of it like same sex marriage. It may be alright for some people, and to each their own, but for me I prefer to stick to what I believe in, good old american technology, and marrying the opposite sex. CP (quickly ducking to avoid the flaming that is SURE to come from this post)

Not enough people use their map products for piracy to be an issue. Aye matey... If Black Beard was around today, he wouldn't loot an inner tube floating away from Cuba He'd cruise the Puget Sound looking for Bill Gates's yacht Now, THAT is darn funny! This is a very good thread, and many of these questions were the same ones posed in a GPS course that we (me and a few unnamed Geocachers) taught tonite in town. Some peope got upset that they could not get "cracked" meaning free software for their units, until they realized that it is no different than me breaking into your house to take something of yours that I FIGURE I SHOULD HAVE FOR FREE. It would sure make me upset. The maps (meaning bluecharts here) are well worth the money, and a complete bargain compared to paying $24 per chart here from the Queens printer. With one unlock code it works out to about $1.02 per chart, a much better deal. Some people would still complain if you gave it to them for free. Beats the heck out of a repair bill for whacking your boat into a reef when the marker buoy drifts off. This happened in a "round the buoys race" one time, we knew where the reef was because it was marked on the chart, and we had a proximity alarm set, the other guys did not, they headed for the buoy which had drifted off in the last storm. CLANG! That was sure expensive. We did not win, but had a good laugh, and went to aid the others. CP

Psstt... a little secret here, this is a GAME. I am not sure that it would be all that much fun if I would just plug in the coordinates and be taken to within centimeters (or inches if playing in the USA) of the cache. That is like taking the persons hand and leading the right to the cache, what fun is that? This is a very interesting thread, and the knowledge presented here is very extensive and informative. If I was intending on surveying property, or trying to aim a cruise missle down your chimney it would be very helpful. It is almost frightening what some people here know. I have to remember never to argue mathematics or logic with you people. But the reality of it is that this is a game, and yes it is helpful if the coordinates are fairly accurate, but if they are off then what? Is someone going to sue me for time lost looking for my cache if the coordinates are off a bit? God forbid I slow someone down on their numbers game by having them take a little extra time to find our cache rather than drive or walk right to it. We try to be accurate when hiding our caches, we average positions, look for areas of good cover but then also try to be a little sneaky when hiding it, that is part of the fun. And besides, who is to say that the person who finds and then replaces my cache puts it back EXACTLY in the same place? I really do not care if EVERYBODY can find every one of our caches, some people may not be able to find them, I expect that and will check them if we get a DNF notice to ensure that they are still there. With our caches now, we try to use the coordinates to bring you to an area, then use clues to solve the puzzle. It seems to work well, and the logs that we get on our caches indicate that the finders enjoy the puzzles. Thanks again for the great info, and remember, it is just a game. CP

Here, try using some of this. Great stuff for working on electronics like this. It will also work good on protecting your new one of these. And if you need any help, you can just email this guy. Hope this helps. CP

Where is my driveway, I HAVE to be able to see my driveway or I cannot navigate to work! What kind of a map is this? Where are the goat trails that we hiked on last summer, SURELY they have be on the map! They call this a map? Hurrumph............good thing it is free........LOL CP

....uh.... Toys..... you gotta have ALL the toys. AND you have to get them in the cheapest possible manner, and tell everyone else about it. You get to spend hours and hours online bragging about how you got it $10 or $20 cheaper online instead of walking into someplace, trying it out and walking out with it right then. The money saved is well spent on all the time discussing it. LOL Well, really when it comes to mapping, you can just be a "dot" if you do not have the appropriate maps in your GPS. With the mapping, you can be a "dot" on a map. I use them a lot when I am on the water, pretty handy if you want to avoid running into reefs, kelp beds, ripe tides or other hazards. Boats are expensive to fix, I don't want to wreck our boat so I don't want to run into hazards and things. I also want to be able to search for the nearest safe anchorage or shelter when traveling to other places in the boat. GPS units with appropriate charts and maps are very useful for this. I also use them a lot when I am in places that I do not know real well like Vancouver, and am looking for an address and have my iQue give me driving directions to where I want to go. As for TOPO maps, well maybe you are looking for a particular tree, or rock. It seems that everyone is really concerned about getting the TOPO maps before they go out into the wilderness, they seem pretty afraid of getting lost. How the heck did we ever do this stuff before GPS and TOPO maps. My Dad must have been insane taking us out canoeing and backpacking with only a paper map and a compass. We did not even have cell phones back then. It is amazing we survived.

I can only IMAGINE the amount of time spent on making that! HOLY S*&% That is way too cool to use, you need to put that in the GEOCACHING HALL OF FAME or something. Where is the Geocaching Hall of Fame anyway? Would the address be listed? Or would it just be a set of coordinates leading to someplace else? Would it be built like a giant tupperware container? Hmmm......

Have not stumbled upon this yet while caching, but...... When I owned my previous computer business, we were in an industrial strip mall, and occaisionally we would find cars parked out back at night. That would not be a problem, BUT, the cars were occupied by people busy with the services of prostitutes. And, they would toss all their (nasty) trash out on the parking lot. There was only one way into this lot, so when we found an occupied car, we would sneak out with a video camera, and walk right up to the car, after filming the licence plate. We would have the light turned off as there was usually enough light to film in good detail. After a few minutes, I would walk up to the car real close, and then turn on the BIG VIDEO LIGHT. LOL Needless to say, most people were NOT impressed that we caught them doing the nasty with a hooker. And that we had called the police and video taped their licence plate and them in the act. The reason we did this is that the police would not come over and do anything about this, so we started to film them and we were opening a website to post the videos. Discussed this with our company lawyer, and found out we could have run into some problem legality wise, but the way I see it, if you are doing the nasty in my parking lot with a hooker, you take those chances.

It takes a lot of playing around, but you will find the best way to use the maps after a great deal of playing around. Try setting the map detail to "normal" or "less" for when you are panning around looking at things. The Legend will redraw much faster. There is a LOT of detail in the Mapsource maps, and it take a while to use it. If you are like me you ended up turning on everything in full detail. This slows you down a lot, and clutters up the screen. Try using different font sizes for points of interest and playing with the detail on the zoom function. The great thing is that once you learn the software, (just like the units themself) all other products from Garmin work EXACTLY the same way. I have most every piece of mapping software from them, and they all live together and work the same way. It sure is nice. If you need any specific help, email me. Pete

That is a pain when that happens. I had a lost set up disk for my new iQue as well, but Garmin airfreighted one up to me here (in Canada) in two days. I tried 9 ways to Sunday to make mine work without the disk. Either I am not good at computers or it just does not work without the driver that is only available on the disk. The desktop worked, the PDA and GPS worked but it would not link without the driver. Give them a call, they are really good for helping out in situations like this. Likely they will just mail you a new one. It is good to have the original one, so just ask them.

Try using this http://www.garmin.com/cartography/mapSource/topoCanada.jsp

That really is a unicycle, huh? Mountain unicycling? Sounds painful! Seen these guys on Discovery channel once. I only have one thing to say about this THESE GUYS ARE A DARWIN AWARD WAITING TO HAPPEN As for the money, I was going to suggest that you come to Canada and spend it here, you can darn near buy a new car for $400 USA. Well at least you used to be able to do that. Maybe you can ride your bike over sometime from Port Angeles, take the ferry across from there and do some caching for the the day or weekend. Makes agood little get away. Enjoy your new bike, I treated myself to a good new one 10 years ago, and I still ride it and enjoy it as much as I did then. It was also gotten with "free money" and it sure makes it enjoyable.

only double???

Nice to know people like you are out there, and come to find people like us who get into these situations. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication Coast2Coast! You people probably do not hear that enough. I saw the story this morning on the news, it was sure nice to hear about a happy ending for all involved, and it must be a great relief for people such as yourself that are prepared for, and usually find a worst case scenario. I have seen these systems first hand, they are expensive but completely worth every penny. I have flown in planes that have them, and thankfully never had to use them. They have been in use on experimental aircraft for a while, and more recently used in certified airplanes. Perhaps now that they have had two successful emergency deployments on certified aircraft, they will be more common. I hope you encounter them more often, and have many more good stories to tell us.

.....and Gekos.......

luken, Get a legend, get a bike mount, put it on the handlebars (good idea to keep the lanyard on it btw) and get out and enjoy it. Do not spend much time worrying about it, it is pretty darn tough. It will not recieve well in your camelback, and it will deprive you of the fun of using it while riding. No, it will not accept an external antenna (except a rebroadcaster unit, very silly idea for a bike) and you will probably be fine with it. If after trying it for a while it does not live up to your expectations, sell it on eBay and cough up $$$ for a bigger unit that accepts an external antenna. I like Garmin, but that being said, any of the big name units (Magellan, or Garmin) will work the same for you, except for the software differences. Remember whatever unit you get will be blocked out from some signals when your body is in the way of the satellite signals from that direction, the ONLY way around this is to get an external antenna and mount it ABOVE your body height. Pretty silly for most applications unless you are performing geodesic surveys from your bike while on the go. Word of caution, don't get so wrapped up in looking at it that you forget to watch where you are going. Get it, use it, Enjoy it!

luken, here is my take on it. The legend works ok for most applications, but what you have to realize is that you give up some antenna performance for the small size of the unit. The eTrex series uses a patch antenna which does work well for its size. But the antenna is not as strong as the helical wound antennas used in the 76 series as well as other series of Garmins. I have used them both together and found that the eTrex series does lose its track first in heavy brush. But, in all fairness it is much smaller than the gpsMAP76s. So you have to decide exactly what it is that you want, small size or somewhat better performance in brush. If you choose one of the Garmins that can accept an external antenna then that leaves you with the option of using a seperate antenna that you can mount on your rear pannier rack. The reason that I say this is the 76 series works best in a vertical position, and I have found it very difficult to use on my mountain bike that way. The 76 series will allow you to flat mount the unit where you can read it easily, and then set up the remote antenna on the pannier rack where it gets the best reception. Of course, this is going to cost you way more money than simply using the legend, (which would be fine for likely 99% of all uses) but then the object of the game is ULTIMATE ACCURACY right? Afterall, money is no object when playing with such cool toys.

Ok folks, Thanks for the advice, just for the record I should have stated that the GPS was on, it was set to Garmin, and the serial port was selected. Turns out that it was a com port problem, software configuration that was resolved by Mariner. But as of yet I do not know how he resolved it as I was not there when he fixed it. Once I understand it, I will make sure it is posted so others can find it also. Thanks again everyone. Pete

Just waiting for the all knowing, everwise Mariner (or a reasonable facsimile) to give me the answer. I even tried the "search" option here on the forums. Sadly, no answer there either. I will wait, someone will know this. Pete